


Tethered

by rosncrntz



Category: Victoria (TV)
Genre: Creepy Vicbourne Goodness, F/M, Ghosts, Halloween, Post-Lord M's death, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 21:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12566712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosncrntz/pseuds/rosncrntz
Summary: A ghost: a spirit whose very soul is tethered to the living. Lord Melbourne has died, but Victoria cannot help but wonder whether he still remains in some way. In the whispering of the air. In the movement of the silence.





	Tethered

Ghosts: spirits whose souls were still tethered, unbreakably, to the living.

They were the work of the devil. Wicked apparitions to lead one to sin or doom – hell, in any case. Victoria was warned against the romantic notions of ghosts and ghouls since she was a little girl. The Bible was her shield, and the supernatural her threat: to guard against and to fear. Luckily for the young Queen, ghosts had never become the active presence that she had expected from her teachings and cautions given to her by Mama and Lehzen during her education. In fact, she had never seen a ghost, nor felt one, nor even thought of them.

That was until her 30th year: 1849, when the first supernatural encounter chilled her to the core.

In her nightgown, she slipped quietly through Buckingham’s marble corridors, when the night was clinging and dark, and the moon was full, pouring silver light through the window at the end of the hall. Victoria could see quite clearly that the moon was at its fullest – round and bright. She held her candle to light her way, for the halls were very dark this time of night, and she had a tendency to frighten herself of what is unseen in the dark. She was just going to bed when she first felt it – that creeping cold, the brush of hardened air, the whispering silence – she shrieked, dropping her light, and only the smell of smoke stayed with her as she flew up the stairs and threw herself, petrified, into the bedsheets.

She cocooned her small frame in the cold blankets, repeating in her mind: ghosts are not real, ghosts are not real, ghosts are not real.

But she had always been told that ghosts were real, when she was a girl. Spirits still tethered to the world of the living by the fibre of their souls. That was the definition of a tingling, a voiceless mutter, a person one knows the _feeling_ of, without need for their voice or body. This was a ghost, indeed. But what could it possibly want from her?

She squeezed her eyes shut, and tucked the sheets up to her chin, and only opened her eyes – in horror – at the sound of footsteps, before realising that it was only her dear Albert, getting in to bed. What a relief it was to have a living body in bed beside her: one with a heartbeat, with warm blood, with breath inflating the ribcage, inflating, deflating, in and out. She was only able to fall asleep with that gentle whistle of his breath beside her. In and out.

Her toes were icy.

The morning gave her sunlight, a blue sky, and she completely forgot her fear, and the incident with the ghoulish presence.

She only remembered when it returned. The next full moon. There was a deep blackness, and she shrouded herself in the bedsheets, comfortable – though alone, at present – and nodding off into sleep. There was the soft rapping of a tree branch against the window pane. Rap. Rap.

A knock startled her into waking.

The tapping of the branch had turned into a knocking, as one knocks on a door, and yet it was coming from the window, closeted behind the curtains of the bedroom. No: it must be coming from the door, she told herself.

“Albert?” she called, turning to the door, “Albert, my love, is that you?”

There was no reply, but the steady knocking fist continued. Knock. Knock. Victoria warily pulled the blankets tighter around her frame, which began to tremble with the cold. She felt naked – exposed completely – and the cotton of her nightdress suddenly seemed paper-thin, and just as easily torn as tissue. Then came the voice, barely audible, but irrevocable, and in a voice which gave her goose-bumps,

“Ma’am.”

Her heart leapt into her throat and, trembling, she swallowed it back down again, almost choking on it. She steeled herself into forming a reply, and she had only just managed to stammer out the beginning of a response when a great, chilled swell swept from the tips of her toes, through her legs, and spread like ice-water across her chest and down her neck. She gasped with the intensity of this feeling; indescribable, not horrific, not entirely pleasurable, but raw and undeniably real. This was not human. Nor was it her imagination. This could be nothing but a soul.

Coming down from her strange moment of high, she cried out,

“Who are you?” Though she felt she already knew. There was no vocal reply, but a warmth – hardly a ghoulish form at all, but with all the gentleness that one assumes to be human – caressed her hand. Victoria could swear she felt a pressure as the ghost’s hand held hers. But then it was gone, as quickly as it had first appeared, and she felt bereft of the spirit’s company.

Lying back in her bed, she reflected. Since November of last year, her dearest and kindest friend – Lord Melbourne – had lain in rest in the ground. Buried, and sleeping, he had left the land of the living behind, and had attired himself in stars and, she assumed, he had gone to heaven, where his son dwelled. What need had Lord Melbourne with the land of the living, now? If this was him, who her entire soul prompted her to believe it was, then she trembled to think upon whom his spirit attended. He was tethered to who he now haunted. And he haunted her.

No. She was being foolish. Silly. It was winter, and so she was mistaking the natural season for ghostly presences! She was overtired, clearly, and so she gathered herself in the bed, and fell disquietly to sleep. And, once sleeping, she felt she was being held. She felt she was being touched by the hands of a man that was not her husband. This was another pair of hands: older hands, hands she trusted, hands she had held at eighteen, hands that had guided her from carriages, hands that she had held to be kissed. These were the hands of her Prime Minister: caressing her now, trailing the lines of her skin, learning and sculpting. Warm and real. Alive.

She awoke, crying, in the dark.

The full moon gave life to him. Quick in sense, she realised that quickly. So, the next full moon, she told her husband that she was visiting her step-sister when, in fact, she was taken in the carriage to Brocket Hall, with only Emma Portman for company. The Queen could not tell Lady Emma the reason for this sudden trip. Emma would simply laugh: the idea of ghosts? What nonsense! So, she insisted that she just wanted to talk to Frederick about his late brother (as Frederick was now the owner of Brocket, and lived there). Frederick, able to do little else, accepted the Queen into his humble abode, and made all the best arrangements he could for her.

Keeping to her words to Emma, Victoria did talk to Frederick about his brother, as they sat together in the library of Brocket. The place still had the very scent of William. Victoria’s eyes filled with tears to smell it again: musk, parchment, and the subtle tang of the fireplace. It was almost as if he was still here: absorbed into the walls, the floorboards, the books he adored and the fireplace which burned as his mind once would have.

“Sometimes I think I still see him,” Frederick remarked.

“You do?” Victoria cried, wide-eyed, imagining that his brother meant the ghostly apparitions that had made themselves quite apparent to her over the last couple of months.

“Yes. In my mind’s eye.” Victoria blushed at her rashness. “I suppose that is the way, though. For someone who is so dear to one’s heart.”

“Yes. I suppose it must,” Victoria pondered, tapping at her hand with her nails, before saying, with some piteous feeling, “I do hope you are not excessively grieved by the loss of him.”

“Ah, no, Ma’am. No more than I can cope with. You must remember that I have already lost a good many siblings, and at least William was of a good age. And he was happy, I believe, at the end.”

“Do you think so?” Victoria implored, a swell of sorrow rising in her chest and bringing tears to her eyes. Frederick looked down at his hands – gathered before his chest – and sighed,

“I do think so.” Then he gave a humourless scoff before muttering, “He did miss you, though.”

“He did?” Victoria whispered.

“Yes. Incredibly so.”

Victoria could feel the unbidden tears pressing at her eyelids, forcing themselves free of their dam, and she turned her face down and bit her lip to bleeding, as not to let her weakness show. Emma quickly changed the subject to matters more pleasing to the Queen: the weather, the hall, the upkeep and the garden. But Victoria did not listen to any words. All she listened to was the pressing of her heartbeat against the ribcage. This ribcage was what kept her tethered to the land of the living. His ribcage was made of air; and his heartbeat was a whisper of air; and the blood was only a pulse of nothingness; his cries just gasps; his movements just stirrings. Her movements were fire and her cries were agonies. This was the roar on the other side of the silence, as Eliot had written it. This was the silence that would deafen a lesser creature than a woman.

She wondered whether he – an immortal spirit as he had evaporated to – could hear the silence, and she wondered whether he was deafened by it.

“It is late, Ma’am, you could get lost… or catch a chill! Perhaps, you should stay inside for tonight,” was Emma’s reply when Victoria expressed a need to go out once the sun had retreated behind the black rolls of earth and grass, and the sky had been daubed into a purple-black.

“No, Emma, please. I will not be long, but I feel I must take the air. If I am gone for longer than an hour, you can send a search party.”

“Please, Ma’am.”

“I am decided, Lady Portman.” The formal form of address silenced the older and wiser woman. Emma could have sworn that the heard the Queen mutter, as she turned and began to walk from the house, as if driven by some force stemming from her very soul, or being pulled by a silver cord which was bound about her heart, “He is calling me.”

She knew where to go. She knew where she would find him. There would only ever be one place: where his soul was damned to return to, again and again, for his heart had been left weeping there.

The rookery. A column – make ashen in the night’s darkness – and a square of stone at the base where one could sit. Indeed, where he had once sat. She could picture him, now, sitting so comfortably in his pea-green coat in the russet autumn light. But now all was dark, and he was dead. But his soul persisted. And she walked towards it, as she had done that autumn, to greet him again.

There was a gathering of rooks, who had descended from their high perches on the treetops, and were sitting and pecking at a patch of the rock where once he had sat. They seemed completely undisturbed by her approach. They did not startle, nor even seem to mind her. They simply moved around each other, preening their glossy wings with white beaks, and not making a single noise. She felt drawn to them. Their marble-eyes seemed to coax her. They were calm and gentle and, as she reached them, she reached out a trembling hand to stroke one’s back. The creature allowed her to run fingers down its feathers. She could feel the breath moving beneath its skin.

Then, suddenly, as if disturbed by some other force than the living flesh, they took to wing, and the great wings snapped as they flew away from her. She shrieked, and tumbled backwards, and then her entire mind flooded ice-cold with the thought that, perhaps, this airy spirit would harm her. Perhaps her mother and Lehzen were right: and ghouls were devil-sent creatures.

_What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,_  
_Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff_  
_That beetles o'er his base into the sea,_

“Lord Melbourne?” she whispered, beginning to feel absurd, but quite confident that her wits had not yet escaped her. There was not a stirring. There was no rising coldness in her body. There was no gentle caress of air. “William?” she asked again, choosing her choice of name more carefully.

She knew that she was not speaking to a Prime Minister now: but the soul of a man, and the man’s name was William Lamb.

Then she felt something substantial – something more than air – something that felt firm and warm like the hands of a real man, the arms of a living creature, envelop her. But there was not a soul there. The body came from behind, and she could feel the chest of it pressing against her back as she leant into the formless form.

“I know who you are,” she sighed, feeling herself falling deeper and deeper into the embrace of the solid air. “I knew you would return to me.”

She could almost hear the air _breathing_ , and the cadence of the breath seemed to push her weakened body up and down as she was lulled into the rhythm of him. There was breath on her neck. Not the wind, for the wind was cold and bitter. This was a man’s breath, warm and slow. She could die in this ghoul’s embrace. She could stand here with a spirit of a man for the rest of her life; until she, too, would join him in the halls of eternal being.

“Oh, I have missed you, my love,” she whispered, turning her body around. She gasped. Her air escaped her. There were eyes, only for a second, and the handsome face of a man she loved, and the ruffle of his hair and the soft smile on his lips. All these things were there like the flickering of candlelight over a wall; and then they were gone, as if the candle had been snuffed out. They had been both there and not there, simultaneously. But there was no possibility they had been a trick of the imagination. He had shown himself to her, and she longed to see him again.

The gold-green of that gaze stayed with her, even when the vision had blown away.

And when her hands reached up to take hold of the face, there was only cold air.

“William?” she cried, “William, come back! Where have you gone?”

But he had not gone. His breath was carried on the air. The cawing of the rooks tolled his name. Brocket encased the heart of him, and she was in possession of his soul.

A spirit. A ghost. Whose very soul was still tethered to the living. To life. To hers.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween. A little ghostly vicbourne one-shot. I hope you enjoyed.


End file.
